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Chef AJ: Forgiving a Betrayal, Driving Anxiety, More | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle Dr Jen Howk
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hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today we have two of our most popular guests the dynamic duo the co-stars of the beat your genes podcast dr doug lyle and dr jen hawk and they have a wonderful website together at steamdynamics.com or for a pittance you can have entry into their membership or you have private q and a's with them much like we're having now but even more exclusive and they're here today to answer your questions on all kinds of subjects like forgiving of betrayal driving anxiety and succeeding in an unclean environment please welcome back dr doug lyle dr jen hawk how are you guys doing today good evening how are you i am terrific i'm so happy to see you guys well let's get right to it because when you guys are on we have lots and lots of questions and the first question is really from last time dr lyle was on on mother's day there was a question from a lady who caught her husband in bed with the neighbor and dr lyle did a wonderful job explaining the why why men my monogamy isn't necessarily something that everyone especially the males in our species can do but the second part of the viewers question was when somebody that you deeply love commits a betrayal or when you feel betrayed how do you forgive and if you are able to forgive how can you ever trust the individual again so this is more of a general question not just pertaining to this lady's situation how do you forgive a betrayal and how do you ever trust a person that committed one that's a complicated i'm going to let let jen wind out a little bit and uh but there's there's a lot of little elements to that one so go ahead and just have at it yeah well i'm sure people want to hear you complete if this was part of part one last time people i'm sure are waiting so i won't i won't go too in depth on this but i would say in in general it's you're you're just you're giving this enough time and enough evidence you're nobody should expect themselves to be able to forgive such a thing right away and that's not going to naturally happen so this if there is forgiveness in the system to be had it's going to come as you continually evaluate your relationship with this person and you you figure out that balance of whether there's enough trust going forward or not so it's um that's only going to come with time there's there's no magic words that the person can say there's no there's there's no way that you can um just kind of force your will into a place where you're like i've decided to forgive them and i'm going to leave it in the past and that's that this is something that organically happens just as you continue to stay open to the information that you're getting in that relationship and weighing out the costs and benefits of everything else that you value about that person and if this is something that is survivable or not that you're not you're not going to know right away and it's going to be different for every individual it's going to be different for every um dynamic that exists between two people because every relationship is a little planet unto itself that's the sum total of those those two personalities in the little universe that exists only between them so that's not anything that we can replicate from from couple to couple to couple and say it's going to take this percentage of time that you were together with somebody to get over them or these sort of rules that you'll hear thrown around those are just guidelines at best and and useless information at worst so it's just going to take what it takes it's going to depend on how naturally resilient you are to this kind of thing it's going to depend on the circumstances under which the the betrayal occurred how unusual was it how how similar is it to other behavior that you've seen is this the final straw where you've been accumulating a lot of evidence that looks like it's pointing in one direction for a long time and this is enough and now you're just done or is this coming out of nowhere and it's very out of character and it was situationally unique it happened because of certain forces all of these things matter depending on on um how you're going to get how you're going to move beyond it and how long it's going to take so i know that's kind of a non-answer that sort of it depends answer but that's really the only way that we can approach something like this but doug might have some more kind of general rules to throw at it yeah it's a 100 agreement i could see things exactly the way jen's talking about i would say that um we we could go into the nuances of how it is to to look at this uh i can i can remember a case where uh the same thing had happened and uh the woman was coming to me and man she was hot under the collar and when i as i found out the details this had happened 25 years ago 25 years this gal was still giving it to her husband like in every every conflict of interest he was at the point of a bayonet and my point to that was number one i see why he might have done this and number two what i can't understand is why he's staying the uh because forgiveness uh or essentially what we're talking about here is uh i mean forgiveness is uh almost an empty word because as jen is saying it's not something that you can actively do it's a it's a it's a derivative of your cost-benefit analysis on the relationship uh similarly the concept of betrayal is interesting uh because what an individual is doing is they are pursuing their best interest and the only reason why you want to be in a relationship with them is that they want to be in a relationship with you because they consider it in their best interest and so then you have to you have to grop your you have to get your wrap your head around the fact that individuals in in principle in the world uh are in have inherent degrees of conflict with each other uh i don't care if that's your best friend i don't care if it's your mother uh the two of you are not the same individual you don't sit in exactly the same psycho-ecological space and so therefore your every need every want every desire are not only not the same they are sometimes in conflict so you know there's one really good vegan chocolate chip cookie left on the plate and i want it and jen wants it jen's jen's got more self-control yeah we both know you're getting that cookie that's that's a terrible example the point is is that there are inherent conflicts between individuals and so last time i talked about the fact that men and women in in mating relationships are inherently conflicted the um and so that those inherent conflicts are going to spill out in you know a number of ways that are going to be that are going to betray the nature of those conflicts and um it could be that you know either party is interested in outside parties it doesn't always have to be the man wearing the black cat that isn't how it has to be uh it could be the other way okay but it generally is going to go that direction by nature of human biology and so the in the great conflict of interest that sits between men and women uh is really around fidelity and the most important part of that dynamic is that men are are biologically more wired to be less faithful that's why you have a thing called a wedding that's why you have a magazine called bride there isn't a magazine called groom with 300 pages of ads in it about all the things that you can buy for the day of your life when you're the groom it doesn't exist okay why doesn't it exist because it's not the big dream of the male why isn't it not the big dream of the male because the big dream of the male is not monogamous pair bonding okay it doesn't mean they're not capable of it and it doesn't mean that they might not be happy and faithful etc in their life but trust me that if your husband's been faithful he hasn't been jimmy carter level faithful jimmy the famous phrase of jimmy carter was i've sinned in my mind well no joke chief yeah and he got a bunch of but got a bunch of flack he almost lost the presidential election for admitting to the utterly obvious thing is there's debates in every little christian congregation about who is the better christian carter or ford and you know maybe it's four because carter admitted that he had sinned in his mind so ford's a better christian for sitting in his mind and lying about it that's that's what that's more virtuous in american politics oh got it got it okay all right good okay so anyway the point of all this is that we have conflicts with other people we have conflicts with the best of other people we have conflicts with the most valuable other people to us and so occasionally those conflicts are going to erupt into something that we might call a betrayal but what it's all it's doing is it's exposing that all of our needs wants desires and goals are not in a 100 parallel in this particular case it's going to the heart of evolution and it's stinging okay and it stings both ways so if a female is unfaithful for a male who's fair bonded to her that stings really deep and hard and it's pretty tough uh to deal with and if it goes the other direction if the male is the one that's it stings pretty hard and it's pretty deep that's because there are enormous evolutionary prices that would fall out from those quote betrayals okay the uh however we also recognize hopefully and we're mature enough and wise enough and maybe open-minded enough to actually understand the fact that that inherent conflicts of interest are natural and therefore everything isn't always going to be the way we would like it to be and so as a result sometimes there are going to be moments that the we aren't they aren't betraying us they're betraying the big lie which is that that we don't have conflicts of interest with other people that sometimes are are profound okay so that's really what got betrayed so now the question is given what the circumstances are as we as jen says as we learn as the weeks and months go by uh in the aftermath of some this kind of a discovery what are we picking up and what cues are we learning and what what is our other our partners signaling to us about how valuable we are and what their personal goals are and those two things are the things that matter how valuable do they find us what are their personal goals for their life that conflict with ours or our incontinence with ours and how valuable are they to us those are the three things that need to be adjudicated and what you're trying to do uh the quote betrayal all it did was inform you that there are conflicts of interest between you and that other individual in a way that you might have been remarkably naive to okay and now you're not naive to it and now you can recompute uh more accurately as you absorb that information what it all means to the future of the relationship and whether or not it's worthwhile and the lady that i'm talking about the amazing thing is despite how furious uh and neverendingly furious she was it was still worth it for her to be around and what incredible to me that despite the feedback that this guy got i ear pure acid for 25 years afterwards he was still uh willing to stick around which is extraordinary and shows you sometimes how valuable another party can be despite all of the negatives that they bring to the table it's like wow i still find them quite valuable and so therefore there's still more benefit than they are cost despite the fact that the costs were damn high so you know if that's not what love is what is it so anyway so i guess uh i come down exactly with jen that you can't guide this process it's a process of you learning about yourself and about the relationship and about the other person and now you're just you have a different perspective that is more accurate than the one that you had before you started okay that may mean that it isn't worth it and you wind up that quote you just can't forgive it it's just too bitter and too disturbing for you um actually that couple my attitude is god what kept you together i hope it wasn't finances because it sure as heck sounded like you know you both would have been better off on an entirely different road you know if we still got fury breathing out of the person's mouth 25 years later it's like whoa uh if had i been the guy that had done that transgression i would have after a year or two of that kind of venom i would have walked okay so this is not you know you didn't kill anybody you just what did you do you betrayed a mate that just can't let go so maybe maybe she can't or maybe he can't and if that's true then then you have to really size that up and maybe make a very rational wise mature decision that says i gotta go this is not this relationship has been poisoned by the realization that we have conflicts of interest oh well okay so um that's how i would look at that it's just that sometimes people just have trouble forgiving it doesn't have to just be infidelity i mean just in general in life that's something people seem to struggle with yeah that's that that's because they're they're running uh cost benefits aj the lack of forgiveness is actually nothing other than the memories of the fact that we discovered a conflict and we discovered something about the other person and how they evaluated us and our nervous system is remembering that as a warning device that the same kind of thing could happen again we got surprised because we actually believed that we were more valuable than the alternative side of the conflict of interest that was sitting inside the other person's head at that moment so we would have fought based on the choices that they had in front of them but they would not not have chosen an alternative you know an alternative friend an alternative nate an alternative decision to go on vacation rather than help me you know when i was recovering from some broken leg in other words they made a choice they made how they may have done it openly which shocked us or they may have done it in secret to cloak it from us uh but then when we found out we found out that we didn't rate as high as we thought we did i.e we are betrayed okay so we effectively felt like we were more valuable to them and they were more valuable to us and we wouldn't have done the same thing if the shoes were on the other foot so we became enlightened in a very unpleasant way about how it is that they value us in the grand scheme of their existence and so we don't quote forgive because the truth of the matter is is that we're remembering that and we as a warning device to ourselves that basically said you used to think that the two of us we were equal in the insurance that we were extending each other we were best friends and we were both extending each other a million dollar policy and every you know every time we got together for a birthday or thanksgiving or or the holidays or just getting together once a month that we're best friends and we're talking because i'm extending you a million dollar policy and you're extending me a million dollar policy in other words uh if you're in trouble i'm going to go all in to help you and if i'm in trouble you're going to go on to help me so those two people can believe that they are actually our person number one can believe that they understand what's happening and then they find out later on that the other person reneged on that implicit deal and that they were that i was being bluffed and in fact they were only insuring me for fifty thousand dollars now it looked like a million and they sounded like a million but the truth is it wasn't okay and that's what that woman feels like when she felt like wait a second i thought that we both evaluated this situation equally of course there would be alternative partners but we wouldn't look at those and seriously consider them and have sex with anybody outside this relationship because this is this has a sanctity to it and i'm so important to you and you're so important to me blah blah and it's like oh well she found out that wasn't true she found out you know she wasn't that valuable not that she wasn't valuable she just wasn't as valuable as she thought she was and so as a result of that she becomes enlightened okay yeah you're not betrayed you're enlightened and now it's not so surprising that someone would bluff you about how much insurance they were giving you or how valuable that you are every insurance company does that every insurance company says sure come on write your checks to us yeah everything's covered everything was covered for me for the last time i went to the doctor i wind up with a 500 bill that i had no idea was coming [Laughter] don't think that i wasn't hot under the caller i was betrayed by my insurance company okay so the uh so the point of the matter is is that all that's really happening is you're becoming enlightened better enlightened about what the real trade processes and dynamics look like that can be so insulting that you basically feel like i can't stay okay or you can say oh oh i have competitors and this person has competitive values that i didn't understand they are still very valuable i still want to be in this relationship but i am i'm aware that maybe i don't extend myself as far or maybe i need to compete harder and extend myself more this is the nuances that jen was describing it's hard to know how any individual is going to react to something like this one individual feels like whoa maybe i haven't been bringing my a game which is why this other person was looking for alternatives to me or maybe they feel like you know what i've been bringing my a game and if that's not enough for better behavior out of you you can just go pound sand i'm out of here or something in between so that's why there isn't a one size fits all even though we can describe the underlying processes for all people the underlying processes for all people are the processes of running relationships through a cost-benefit analysis and discovering at a time like this that you've been surprised by how the other person is actually viewing the trade between us and them and their alternatives in the world they have to they're always running us against alternatives uh whether it doesn't matter if you're on a desert island they're running it against alternatives and so you are always competing for your mate and there are there may be moments in your life when you lose and um but that doesn't mean you've lost it forever and nor does it mean that they're not worth pursuing and competing for i.e uh you can you can forgive quote unquote in other words it's worth staying but not forget in other words i remember what i learned okay so everybody's processes are going to be different depending upon the unique cost-benefit analysis that comes with the dynamics between those two individuals and where they are in their life and personality i mean we can't forget personality there's so much individual difference just in how people are wired in their general disposition and so there is a more forgiving personality um and a more kind of you know grudge holding revengeful personality i mean those those are real differences that exist at the genetic level between people so that's not the whole story you can have somebody who all things equal is has a more forgiving personality but they uh are looking at a betrayal that is so significant that they can't get past it when somebody who is you know has a different personality would so these things are very dynamic and change all the time but personality is a big part of the story too yes great thank you well who was it william blake that said it is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend yeah you didn't pay the premium on that insurance yeah yeah you don't you don't feel the betrayal nice so this question from vanessa while specific to her i got to tell you i know at least 12 people that suffer from driving anxiety and can't drive the freeway she says 20 years ago when i was 40 i was hit head on by someone who literally had just gotten their license it was a fiery crash my car was totaled i was seriously injured riding in the ambulance to the hospital the paramedic had said to me that if the same accident had occurred on the freeway i would be dead he went on to say that while you're more likely to be in a car accident driving the city streets with everyone going different directions because of the high speed freeway crashes are more likely to result in a fatality it is now almost 20 years later and i'm still not able to drive the freeway and my driving anxiety has gotten so bad that i'm not even able to be a passenger in a car driving on the freeway i'm about to turn 60 and feeling sad because this limits my life and makes my world smaller and smaller right now i'm only able to drive very short distances in perfect weather during daylight and only when absolutely necessary for example like going to a doctor's appointment that can't be done online i am missing out on so many special events like my niece's graduation from medical school my grandson's bar mitzvah and my granddaughter's wedding and this is causing a lot of sadness in my family i am willing to undergo any type of treatment that you can recommend for driving anxiety even as an inpatient perhaps i waited too long is there any hope for me to at least be able to be in a car while someone else is driving thank you yes there is hope for you and the the kind of thing that you're describing is the kind of thing that can generally be unwound by systematic desensitization so you need to find a i don't know what city you're in that uh you need to find a a cbt particularly behavior therapist uh that specializes in this not just some not just somebody with a master's degree that you know got their degree from the cal state and then has been practicing for a few years does some family therapy and some kid talk on the side no you need a behavior therapist someone that does this for a living they are a specialist and they typically the way behavior therapy is done is that you have an appointment every day okay so every single day you have an appointment and the next day you go a little deeper the next day you're not doing when i say deeper i'm not talking about any psychodynamic bs uh it has to do if you you know first you may just spend all day having your uh for an hour you may just sit there and deal with your anxiety when you've got your handle on the car door that's your hand on the car door then you're sitting in the car okay etc then you're in the car then you're driving the car down the little street then the next day you're driving a little bit faster and the next day we do it in the rain even though you know you say you can't handle the rain oh well you've got an appointment okay so by actually uh essentially guiding the person firmly through a process of of continually challenging that anxiety with increasingly uh problematic issues and then when they get too far they start to overwhelm the system that's where the behavior therapist is competent to actually calm you down and get you to relax and do some relaxation exercises for a few minutes so that you can bring down that anxiety level and then we continue to go forward okay so this is what this is this was discovered by joseph wolpe in like 1958 or whatever the heck it was and this is uh this is how it is that we do this so this is not common garden variety psychotherapy and incidentally for people who are generally anxious about all kinds of things in the world this will not work so that would be the equivalent of changing your personality but this is a highly specified um essentially phobia okay and highly specified phobias again this is a as i said that you don't forget because it's a warning device that's what this is in other words uh this person hasn't had all kinds of other things go wrong in their life and go weird sideways no it's this it's a highly specific phobic reaction to a trauma this is the only place that trauma is legitimate okay anything else that you've heard that somebody had some bad thing happen to childhood and that's why they're having trouble with their work or their mate or anything else that's all complete and total bs now that's just their personality this is different okay this is a highly and obviously it's probably this individual uh is is genetically predisposed to this so this is already a high wire high conscientious generally high tension individual in all likelihood however this specific incident was significantly traumatic enough but their nervous system is kicking up adrenaline which and an avoidance reaction to this process and she's obeying the avoids reaction and finding that her her world is getting smaller and smaller as she keeps staying one yard inside the perimeter as to not challenge that anxiety okay unless you challenge the anxiety your nervous system can't update the information and determine that you're wrong so this is the way that this is done uh that's what you need to do and if you're in the middle of visalia god help you because there isn't a there isn't a competent behavior therapist in in small town america exceedingly unlikely you need to be near a big city on that big city you know we need to have somebody that uh that is known as a specialist with this specific type of problem well if i was a gambling person i would lose because i always think you're going to say something and you never you say something completely opposite it's like i would picture you say oh yeah that's it just don't drive take uber but you always surprise me there you go well that's why i'm here there's still a few surprises left wow and and and you know what there's a lot of people watching that relate to this this is this is not like a this is no it's very common it's very common yeah yeah yeah well and it's an interesting that you would think we would say the the uber answer because if you if you can't get that kind of exp essentially exposure therapy if you're not in in a big city where you can find somebody to work with you and do this um and you're or you're not willing to do it then you start thinking about how you can address it at the environmental level and that would be taking uber instead i mean it sounds like this person for this person it's bad enough that um even being a passenger is problematic but um that's that's the point at which like if you can't solve the root cause of the problem you you look for the how can you mitigate the environment how can you uh put yourself in a better position where you're not going to be confronting this all the time but there there definitely is potential to diminish the anxiety through that kind of exposure therapy with something like a phobia like this wow that's so interesting thank you all right so the next question is from a health coach named faith i'm a health coach and was wondering what to do when i have a client who is not willing to ask for support in the home from family members to keep the environment clean or whose family refuses and is constantly buying junk and eating junk is there truly any way for the person struggling to be successful in losing weight or overcoming a lifestyle related disease in this situation jen you can have fun with this i have a few thoughts on that they can't be curious as to what you might say yeah i think you're i mean it's not that it's impossible if if somebody again is this is similar to the last question where if you if you've hit a level of resistance where you're just not willing to lay down the law and say you know stop bringing the doritos into the house because it's not a safe food for me and i can't have it here um or if the person just keeps doing it anyway even though you've asked them to there there is there is a fix to that problem it just requires a lot of discomfort on your part so it requires making the person upset it requires introducing some conflict into that relationship and and saying it's really important to me that we do this and if you're not willing to do it then that's a that's a major conflict of interest between the two of us and it's going to be unpleasant and and so you're essentially choosing to minimize that conflict of interest with the other person rather than to get what you need to be successful in in with this particular goal um so you of course people can be successful people can can have problematic food around in their immediate environment and not get into it that happens all the time but your you're uh you're making it much harder for yourself doing so so you're just you're these are all trade-offs you need to think of this as trade-offs like what are you um how uncomfortable are you willing to make that relationship to make it easier for you to reach this very difficult goal that is almost impossible for people to reach under even under ideal circumstances so i think there's kind of this inference that goes along with this question where this should be easy you know beating this problem that we're not adapted to solve and that almost nobody can beat entirely that that should be painless and required no no uncomfort no discomfort or sacrifice and and no disruption to my status quo and my relationships and the harmony in my home and that's just very unlikely to be true it's almost certainly going to require some level of disruption and discomfort um and so i think embracing that as part of the process to make it as easy as possible to eliminate these what we call channel factors you know that are gonna that are going to hold you back from where you want to go how easy do you want to make it for yourself you only have so much willpower to throw at this thing um and you are now calling upon every last little iota of it all the time you're just really making a very difficult problem even harder for yourself if if you're making that set of choices you're certainly welcome to make them and it doesn't stop you from success it just makes it less likely and it makes it more difficult beautiful i i i want to give somebody a uh give people an example of my situation so i have a couple of overgrown are you going to describe them i don't know how to describe them they're not quite waste rules they add value i had a relationship wonderful relationship that that ended and then but what came out of it was a uh godfather status to a bunch of teenagers that then eventually became young adults and at the moment two of them were living in my house and when one of them was living one of them came back to prepare for her wedding so um but the other one is so non-problematic that i've never minded his wasteral-like behavior in and around my refrigerator it's fine like i don't even see the stuff that he has in there doesn't doesn't i don't blink and he's a wonderful extra little companion for my mother so we've got my mom and i and sam uh in the house and everything's fine so i don't have a problem and then the next one comes okay so now suddenly there's two of these overgrown children uh in my house and now there's now there's too much crap in the refrigerator and now there's so much crap in the refrigerator that it's hard for i'm not tempted by any of it but it's hard for me to reach in and get my stuff so suddenly a couple months goes by and i'm like getting really irritated and i'm finding that you know i'm i'm on chat ah telling people to do something about their environment meanwhile i'm hot on the caller have my own environment and so uh i did something mildly uh radical yeah mildly radical but i i bought another refrigerator small one uh and and stuck it right in there right in the kitchen and i stuck it right in there and it has a rule and the rule is you can take anything out of my refrigerator that you want that you can't put anything in it okay i don't want any crap in that refrigerator and i want to know that when i open that refrigerator door the only you i don't care if you buy you know golden delicious organic apples i don't want to see them in my refrigerator because i want to know that i know what's in that refrigerator i want it to all be my stuff if you want to steal some of my grapes fine but the point is is that is my territory and let me tell you something i've had nothing but inner peace since that happened i walk right past the old refrigerator which is the big refrigerator that used to be mine and no longer is and i don't even it i don't even blink okay so yeah you do what you can to modify the environment as best you can and i think jen said something this time that i i had never quite grasped on this question and that is you have to embrace the fact that there's conflict as it is of course a natural consequence of you trying to do something amazingly bizarre and so we we tend to think of it this way i'm right i'm trying to do what's right for my health you're in the way you're being self-indulgent and self-destructive you're dragging me me down i have to get in conflict with you it's unpleasant i'm a nice person you're super valuable to me you're getting all hot and bothered over me saying no i don't want the donuts and the pizza in here because it's tough on me and now we're in conflict okay and quietly you feel righteous and indignant and cornered and lost and and guilty over your own inability to just carve out your own space and just do it you know without imposing on them and etc and you feel guilty that you can't do it okay so all of those things have wound up with aj and i basically saying well i'm saying hey it's tough you got to work harder on your environment than you do on yourself and aj's like get rid of them [Laughter] so the point is is that we recognize and understand the frustration and the different layers of it however one of the things that jen is now saying is hey let's embrace the fact that we've got a conflict here and understand that this is part of the process that we have to be dialing up for and so i i have to tell you i haven't had to do that much in my life uh because i've been in enough control of my environment until or tell the the one kid came back it came back in december it was supposedly going to be here for a few weeks it's turned into six months so by february i've started to climb the walls it's like oh okay this is this is i'm not willing to live four more months of my life in food chaos this is too much trouble so i changed it and it's been nothing but inner peace since so that's an example of you know we do what we can with that environment let's work it well i guess she was asking from the perspective of a health coach is there any way just tell them what we're saying yeah just mimic what we're saying in other words hey this is yeah the health coach it's not going to do us any good to be sanctimonious and tell them that they have to do this and they have to do that the issue is it's like okay listen we have problems we've got obstacles let's look as close as we can about the specific obstacles so my example for myself is perfect it isn't that i wasn't even tempted but the point is is that literally reaching in to get the vegetables is now a hassle i got to take a bunch of stuff out i find myself not even wanting to do it okay so i'm getting stopped by frustration and essentially sensory overwhelming and hassle and so i needed to eliminate that and so you you you want to do a microanalysis of what it is that's getting us off course now for example if if somebody was bringing in vegan donuts from the vegan donut shop every day that would be a problem that would be a serious problem and i would have to tell that person you can't do that okay and i tell them if you do if you bring them in here if they're in this kitchen i'm telling you where they're going they're going down the garbage disposal okay and i mean business so if you want to bring those in the house it's fine but they may be hidden away and i'd better not be able to smell them or see them because that would be a problem for me um i'm not i'm no saints i'm not alan goldhamer i'm not going to just be able to walk by you know i'm more like uh ulysses that had to be tied up you know such humility just really admirable so that's that's how i looked at it but that creates i mean if you've got somebody who's bringing donuts into your house and you're like this is the way that it is then they're pissed off they're like hey this is my house too i should be able to have my donuts that you've introduced this conflict which is just it is it is secondary to the fact that you were trying to solve a really unnatural problem so it's gonna it's just gonna throw all kinds of distortion and noise into this whole process we shouldn't expect it to be a normal conflict resolution process because you're dealing with essentially addictive substances and your own lack of control around them or or the fact that it makes it very very difficult for you to get what you're trying to get done by having that around so you yes you've made things less comfortable in that relationship but it's donuts people it's like if that is a deal breaker somebody if somebody bringing their junky food into the house and you saying this is really problematic for me this is my health we're talking about this is what i really need to be able to reach my goals if that's the deal breaker for the person then then that is some cause to re-examine all of the dynamics of this relationship because i'm not sure that person really has your best interests at heart so um it's this is this is embracing conflict as a way to get to the truth of the relationship and the truth of yourself and and everything else which is what life is it's you're not getting you're not de-distorting yourself unless you lean into discomfort in all ways faith the health coach is watching live and she is saying what if the kids are young and eat the crap because the spouse feeds it to them well you know that this is jen just told you so go back and listen to the tape of what uh what it is that you just said you have to you have to basically lean into the discomfort with that conflict of interest between those two spouses i.e if you feed our kids this stuff and it's around and it's a serious problem for me this is getting in my way okay so i need your help at us figuring out how we're going to arrange this so that this isn't in my face if they don't if they're not willing to actually work with you on that we've got a serious problem to examine in the cb of that relationship so that's exactly what we're talking about thank you so this is another environment question but from the perspective of someone who appears could have a clean environment named jennifer i'm hopefully plant-based sos free always in compliant with chef aj's program 90 of the time i'm not happy with my rate of weight loss and want need to increase my compliance of eating to the left of the red line why do i keep making these little cheats with dried fruit avocado and hummus with tahini maybe my mind considers these foods to be healthy and really wants foods with a higher caloric density do you have any suggestions for a system to increase compliance other than getting all the high calorie dense foods out of the house boy people are sure reluctant to have a clean environment it's so easy when you do you know to me doctors having it trying to solve this problem an unclean environment i was thinking it's like trying to fly a kite on a day when there's no wind yeah yeah or trying to fly a kite with a bunch of rocks loaded on it that's you can get some lift you know you're gonna get it up off the ground a little bit but you're not gonna get it very high because it's loaded down with a bunch of weight so yeah i i think the general rule here is that whatever the most calorie dense food in your house is even if it's a biochemically perfectly healthy food like dried fruit you're going to get into it you you cannot help but get into whatever whatever the the most calorie dense food is or whatever combination of foods that you can put together that is going to be the most calorie dense so you know i i have told tales of woe about my problem with costco dried mango which is delicious but if it's in the house it becomes a problem because it's it is by far the most calorie dense food in the house and it's really just not safe to have around that like it's like a three pound bag or something it's ridiculous so there are ways that i can kind of manage that if i'm sharing the bag if the bag doesn't solely belong to me and i'm sharing it with someone else in the household i have a little bit of a respect for the like i'm not going to eat the entire bag because it doesn't entirely belong to me so it becomes a more safe food if there are certain parameters moved around but everybody just has to be sensitive to these things um but i can get i mean i think people are very sorry i've got my my brother is calling me which is a very rare event um but he's just ringing through the facetime making much noise so i think people will continue to move this with whatever they have so um you know i've had clients get very very creative where they will find ways to make some bread like product out of some grain that they have in their house they'll make some flatbread and then they'll make some hummus with the chickpeas and they'll drag the tahini out of the back of the fridge it's like these things having them around is part of having a an interesting and stimulating whole food plant-based diet so you can make reasonable recipes and and live a life that has tasty food in it you're just always going to be sort of um trying to hack the system and put together really calorie dense combos of whatever it is that you have so instead you uh like i think the only way you could get around that is to have a very non-stimulating environment that is um you know suitable for some individuals i think aj might be one of them i mean you really are just you're you're eating a high volume very low calorie density diet that is okay for your nervous system a lot of people just can't quite manage that it's just not going to hit the satiety dings the right way so they need a little bit of tahini in the fridge to make that salad dressing but that becomes a problem when you start thinking about well i could use it to make hummus instead and then i could put the hummus on something and i'm going to put it together so this is this is knowing yourself it's knowing what sort of balance between a perfect environment and an arbitrary level of calorie density that is defining that environment um can be versus what kind of goals do you really have for yourself and how reasonable are they how how are you are you looking at some vanity pounds that you're trying to lose is the rate of weight loss happening but just slower than you would like but it's still we're talking like one or two pounds a month then hold the line keep doing what you're doing if it's working and you're feeling satisfied yes it's slow but um trying to trying to get it to go faster than that by essentially engineering your environment in an unsustainable way is going to create more problems for you in the long term than just kind of dealing with the fact that it's a little slower and a little less successful than you'd like in the short term great thank you this is from stephanie my brother's been an alcoholic for 40 years he's at the point of being deathly ill vomiting writhing in abdominal pain sick as a dog every night promising he'll never drink a drop again and 12 hours later does exactly what he did the night before can you say something to him oh yeah can you hear me no near me oh i ranted so much i broke my phone we can i can hear you yeah let's get i just can't hear you jen can you hear me jen can you hear aj i can hear you now i just disconnected and reconnected the bluetooth i think facetime knocked it out yeah that's right all right good thank you i'll read the question again from stephanie brother's been alcoholic for 20 years uh deathly ill vomiting writing in abdominal pain seek as a dog every night promising he will never drink another drop again 12 hours later does what he did last night how can you be so sick realize why you're sick and then just do it again and again i think that's called addiction or something like that yeah well let me actually explain this a little bit um i i don't know this is just for i guess for intellectual entertainment this is actually uh what you're describing is echoed in one of the most important studies in the history of psychology so the history of psychology uh in the 20th century was dominated really by two figures uh and uh we're not we're going to get away from clinical psychology and freudian thinking or carl rogers we're talking about academically oriented uh insight into human nature uh and those uh the two major figures were ivan pavlov and then later bf skinner and on the backs of those human was built a thing that we call learning theory and learning theory is uh is the bedrock concept that underlies basically almost all analysis in the social sciences uh to this day and so teachers are completely have nothing other than learning theory in their head social workers the counselor at the school uh the psychotherapist the marriage counselor everybody's thinking learning theory in other words so thinking but the reason why people do what they do is that they've been reinforced for things or they've been punished for things and uh and so they avoid things they've been punished about and they they're they go towards things where they've been rewarded so if they've had traumas in their past they're avoiding anything that's associated with that trauma if they've been rewarded for being a good person because they their their mom was weird and so they did certain things for that then that's why they are the person they are today and as in essence it's summed up in the phrase that you're the sum total of your experiences this turns out to be essentially entirely incorrect has almost nothing to do with it you are in fact the person you are for other reasons than your experiences your experiences are interesting uh and they are unique to you and they they create a fabric of what your life experiences but that's not what made you so it's going to turn out that this whole concept of learning theory in other words there's some tenants that underlie it so for example if you do something and you're rewarded for it then you're going to more likely to do it again if you do something and you're punished then you're less likely to do it again that seems unbelievably obvious and it can be demonstrated in the laboratory as demonstrated by all learning theorists and everybody had this concept but there's certain variables that are really important like what's the timing connection between the two things you know if you if you reinforce them right away that's important if you wait too long it's useless well this uh this was this these became known as the laws of learning and uh and said with great sanctimony from the pulpit but this is how it is except that in the early 1960s some people that trained animals came along and started saying you know what uh we use these principles but it turns out that they don't totally hold there's something wrong uh and if anybody that's ever tried to train a cat if anybody's ever tried to do that good luck to you okay uh they don't train the way a dog trains very different and so uh the the noise got loud enough and the concept that you can't just expect the uh creatures to learn things just because they've been quote reinforced or punished in a certain way that reached the mind of the berkeley professor named john garcia and john garcia then conducted a very interesting series of experiments and i'll tell you about one of them and the reason we're taking the time to do this is so that you understand exactly what it is that you're actually up against the um what garcia did was he would take for example took rats and he put a little chakra around their foot and then when they eat regular food that's all fine that's what they're just you know their their experience has been but then he would introduce a novel food and a novel food that might be tasty that they're interested in and every time they take a bite out of it he'd shock him okay so you'd think that every time if you take a bite out you shock it that pretty soon you're going to feel aversion to taking the bite out of that food but it turned out they never got a burst to death never happened didn't matter how many times they he shocked them when they're wandering around they take go take a bite of that food get shocked no way do they reduce their likelihood of going around getting that food again now that goes contrary to learning theory first the creature's been penalized for this thing that they're doing and they do it anyway then what he did was he he uh had them eat the novel food not get shocked hang around for a while and then six hours later he used a mild dose of radiation to make them feel nauseous if he did that one time none of those rats would ever take another bite out of that food again just like that he then decided well that's interesting and remember in the shock condition they're doing it over and over and they're doing it right as they take the bike never learn it they get one dose of nausea six hours later 12 hours later he then went 24 hours on rats no never tasted it before taste that little bit of novel food take it out of the cage they run around and do everything else they do for the next 24 hours 24 hours later they feel nauseous they'll never eat that food again john garcia tried to publish that and journal after journal rejected him this is not some guy from the street or this is not an animal trainer telling you you're wrong this is a major league berkeley professor telling you hey i just proved that learning theory is absolutely built on quicksand you guys don't know what you're talking about they rejected him and rejected him and rejected him and rejected him and one of the reviewers said this is no more likely to be true than there's bird crap in my cuckoo clock well they were all wrong must have been reviewer number three the uh they were all wrong and john garcia was anticipating what becomes known as evolutionary psychology okay which is what jen and i do it's the concept that you are biologically prepared to understand and learn certain things and you are not biologically prepared to learn and understand other things and if you're not biologically prepared to learn and understand something it's damn near impossible for you to do it the pleasure trap is to the best of my knowledge the only document major document on this topic that actually attempts to explain this everybody else is looking for every reason why this is difficult for you got troubles with your mother you got troubles in your you know your your history situation you've got things eating away at your soul and you're trying to fill it no okay no you were not biologically designed to learn this and your brother was not biologically learned designed to learn that when he drinks alcohol and he gets a hyper dopamine and endorphin response to it that tells him he just did the right thing and then seven hours later he feels sick he's not actually designed to make that connection okay so you are the rat who's designed to make the connection of a novel food being sick later that's a fascinating evolutionary connection that would have been invaluable but it turns out that over drinking alcohol that's not a connection that you're designed to make you're also not designed to make connection that fritos are bad for you you're not designed to make that connection either or those vegan chocolate donuts that i would have pushed in out of the way to get one okay i'm not designed to make that connection either so the question is when you say well then how can people do it and the answer is well a small percentage of highly motivated unbelievably conscientious determined people after usually multiple failures and quite a road of an odyssey can manage to pull this off to some varying degrees that's the truth okay so that uh so that's why i would never expect hearing the story uh that this guy's ever gonna be able to get out of it nor is it a mystery to me okay this is why i wrote that book the pleasure track okay the pleasure trap is as the tagline says it's mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness it's a hidden force it's an unnatural problem it is excruciatingly difficult and impossible for most people to defeat whatever version of it that they're in you might be able to defeat it i might be able to defeat versions of it i'm sure i could not defeat all versions of it you know don't don't get me addicted to heroin when i'm not looking because the truth is i very well may not be able to get out of it or cocaine for that matter there's a reason why i never tried anything like that it wasn't because i thought i was going to lose my mind i was terrified of being addicted and not being able to get out of it that's why okay so other people are more open and more wild and so they do more things like that and occasionally they get mouse trapped by a nervous system that was not designed to face that problem that's your brother so your brother sometime early in his life he took a drink and it turned out unfortunately for him he had a hyper normal dopamine response okay and as a result he got trapped okay so this is the uh this this is the problem it's it's not his fault there's not you know there's almost nothing that he can do about it uh he may you know if he was unbelievably determined he might be able to find some daylight and get through a crack not an easy thing to do as my brilliant beautiful colleague jenn hawk can tell you from first-hand experience this is this is one of the most difficult things anybody would ever do yeah i barely got out barely got out and that's just alcohol i mean it's not it's like like doug is saying it's not heroin it's not meth um so yeah it's it's a tenacious trap yeah you don't expect it to be simple and this is this is also a um it gives one pause you know when uh if you if you're in a relationship with somebody that's in that trap and particularly if it's early you know you didn't need to look hard at that issue because there you're you're probably looking at a long-term thing that will probably not uh go away so that's uh but your brother your brother is unfortunately uh barring a a uh some kind of a bizarre little miracle unfortunately he's a victim of a trap that he wasn't designed to get out of wow so people are saying well how do you help these people so i guess you can't i mean there there's things that you can do you can give them opportunities you know what i'm saying uh some of these opportunities are useful but you cannot you cannot reliably take somebody by the hand and walk them out of an addictive trap that is not that is not reality uh that that's like trying to get that rat to see that it nibbles some novel food it gets a shock on its life it's not designed to make the connection and it never makes it so um but what you can do uh just as a follow-up to that i can tell you the kinds of things you can do as i've told the story before of a client that came in uh struggling with alcohol addiction and the wife came in and we were working for a while and then i said it dawned on me that we had to to as i started going down through the control we needed to place in the environment and they looked at each other and she said well we have wine in the house because i like a glass of wine with dinner and i i looked at them i remember they're very nice people and i remember feeling hostile i've had the exact same thing happen i actually felt hostile and there's a nice lady a nice guy too and i'm like i looked at her like you've got to be kidding like i i toned it down by a factor of five because i wanted to yell okay i was like no you can't have that announce she's like we have a lot of nice wine what am i supposed to do with that i said give it to your friends pour it down the drain it's out of here when you guys go out to dinner you never get a drink of wine ever you go out with your friends maybe that's fine but not with your husband never ever ever ever ever you are done wow big i shock people misunderstand like you know people are often like oh is it okay if i have alcohol in the house you know are you gonna be tempted by it and at this point you know i'm i'm seven and a half years sober like it's it's actually not a problem i'm not tempted by it but for somebody in early and this is different for everybody so just because it's been that long for me it doesn't mean there aren't other people who are eight years older who can't have any alcohol anywhere in the house but but what it does is it's not necessarily that he's going to be tempted by that bottle in the cabinet and sitting there you know white knuckling that particular bottle maybe he is but really what you're doing is you're just chipping away at the existing willpower for the entire problem and this is what the food does too when people have the crappy food around so it's not necessarily the issue that your spouse is going to get into your particular stash of stuff um they might not like that stuff or whatever it is it's just that you are you're you're you're demanding so much bandwidth from them to fight the the thought of alcohol and and the the just to engage in this little battle in their mind all the time that otherwise they wouldn't have to be fighting at all and so when they encounter when they walk by their favorite bar on the street tomorrow they they have a little more free-ranging willpower to throw at the problem at that moment because it hasn't all been depleted by at home so that's really what it is it's it's not oh well i use this to make the pasta sauce or whatever it's it's a more subtle process than that i think people who haven't struggled with addiction don't quite grok that right boy well said if you aren't an addict then your ability to have insight into what this trap looks like is is almost zero and so the uh and that's why this lady is so perplexed that watching her brother go through this unbelievable incredibly predictable tragedy on a daily basis and her she can't see how compelling the trap is because she doesn't live inside of it but it's um this compelling trap it has a lot of different versions you'll see a similar version of this in anorexia uh the in other words it's it's exceedingly difficult to understand what's going on inside the mind of an anorexic when you're trying to pull them towards health you're trying to get them to do something that is so absolutely in their best interest but their actual biological design is driving them to do what it is that they're doing same kind of thing with the alcohol addiction in other words these uh these traps can be super perplexing and extremely difficult to manage and and it's it's heartbreaking when you care about somebody and they they're in it and yet you know you can do what you can but you can't actually there if there isn't a one to a hundred steps to fixing it what there is is that there's a few things that you can do to really eat and about their their journey but the rest of it is up to them uh that's that's all you can do it's interesting because you said if you don't have this problem you can't understand it because the person that had the health coach question is somebody with no addictions at all and like you know she so she's like i don't get it she's like alan it's like i don't get it what's the problem yeah do you guys have time for one more question from an hcnc or you want to save it okay oh no one more thank you and then then we have officially caught up with the ones that have been sent in those of you that are questions in the chat you can consider having a private consultation with either of these fine doctors they are wonderful and i have all the information on how to do that in the show notes hi dr lyle and dr hawk this is from morgan i'm a highly conscientious person on the big five and despite distancing myself from my parents and some siblings in an effort to establish healthy boundaries and model healthy relationships for my children i can't stop myself from sending birthday cards to these family members i even have my kids help out with the cards sometimes to uncles they've barely even met the recipients never acknowledge receiving the cards and in turn never acknowledge my birthday or my kids birthdays i'm beginning to feel that my high conscientiousness is winning out over what might be healthy or happy for me but if i stop i feel like i've completely closed the door on the relationship when is high conscientiousness not doing you a favor that's sort of too broad of a question the more specific question about what you're dealing with would be more worthy of that so jen what are your thoughts on that yeah i think it's that's high conscientiousness it's also agreeableness you know it's also you're you're trying to reasonably continue to send out these little olive branches but you're hoping that you're going to get something back in return so you're continuing to invest in this relationship hoping that there's going to be some sort of payoff and so you're you're feeling like if you completely shut off that you're the little drips of of goodwill that you're still giving these relationships that there's no future for it whatsoever and that's a that's a reasonable thing to infer so i think this is this comes down to can how how capable are you of letting go of your expectations of what you're going to get in return for those cards like how much you know people will say well i just do this because i care i do it out of the goodness of my heart you're really doing it because you're you were looking for that reciprocity and it's not coming and it's unlikely to come um so is that something that you can live with can you you know would you still be okay sending these cards on birthdays and holidays for the next several decades if you never got any sort of reply in return um so i would i would just look at that very honestly and really ask yourself that and then i mean the the world will not end and these relationships do not hinge completely on what you do over the next year so if you stop sending cards for a year um you just cut it off now as an experiment to see what happens um and they they don't reach back out you haven't done irrevocable damage to that relationship that wasn't already there it's not like you can't walk that back a year from now if you if you look at it honestly at that point and you feel that it's still worth putting something into and meanwhile you've taken a step back and you've tried to tame your own conscientiousness a little bit and taken a break from investing in relationships that are uh really sound like pretty much a drain and unlikely to pay off so i would i would look at this experimentally and just take a break and figure out how your conscientiousness deals with that and how liberated you feel from those expectations a year later and then if you don't like it and and it doesn't it hasn't paid off and you still feel anxious then just continue to send cards as if nothing happened what are they gonna do when you do reconcile and you're all together they're gonna they're gonna about the one year that you took off from sending the cards when they never sent anything in return i think it's worth just investigating your own feelings by changing the rules a little bit yeah yeah in addition there's no there's no modeling any of this for your daughter oh no that's yeah so uh yeah your daughter will have her own genetically built in analysis of every individual relationship that she has and she will invest and pursue things to to whatever extent that she feels like it's in her best interest so she doesn't need to learn to be a steadfast little hcnc you know at your knee she either is or she's not right yeah yeah one of the uh one of the secrets of life is to uh the insight that that our happiness is uh not dependent upon what anybody else does so if we don't grasp that then we can be very frustrated when the relationships that we are seeking or trying to keep are not those people on the other side aren't behaving and doing things in a way that we would like to see i.e signals of our value to them so one of the secrets is dropping that and essentially realizing that i don't have to have positive feedback from anybody okay so i would like to go compete in marketplaces to receive positive feedback from some people i'm free to do that and i'm free to go out and explore and find people in the world who would be eager and happy to be in relationships with me but this one individual or these individuals that are frustrating me because they are not giving me positive feedback signals i i would be a fool to be wasting my time and energy trying to get them to engage in these relationships and therefore give me the positive feedback that i would think is totally reasonable and they should like now if people don't if people don't like your soup don't keep making it okay and keep insisting that it's good and good for them and that you're giving it to them at almost no cost all they have to do is just smile and say thank you no if they don't like your soup they don't like your soup go you know go give your soup that you like to other people and offer it and then it'll be delightful when those people say wow we love your soup that's how to do it there's a feeling of emptiness and and chronic insecurity that comes from trying to buy esteem from other people too so so if they're not freely offering it which they're not you're you're sending those cards as like hey look what a good deal i am i'm still on sale like don't forget like you know buy now buy now buy now and they're not and so you're getting you're reading their refusal to acknowledge you as as a as a rejection as a signal of of poor esteem which which it is but so if they were to kind of play the game and send a half-hearted little card back i mean it's it's just it's that's still not real esteem either and so even if you were to get that that would feel you would feel sort of um just chronically insecure about it you would feel like you kept you still have to keep pain into the system to get more of that mediocre feedback which is not the kind of feedback that you want to be oriented toward in life you want to be oriented into toward this freely given esteem for based on who it is that you are and and not having to kind of trick or fool or coerce or or you know bamboozle people into loving you because that's not that's not a secure place to be and you're not going to feel good there yeah beautiful wow guys thank you so much oops let me turn my light on i was giving myself a break uh dr jones watching live says two of my favorites another great session so thanks so much for coming back and answering everyone's questions we love having you on and we get so many views when you're here it's great to see you we'll see you next time yeah a lot of people are commenting on your background dr hawk i guess not everybody knows the meme so they thought it's interesting now you now that you've seen it you will see the meme everywhere so i took a calculated risk that a lot of people are going to be like what the hell but it's it's it's a thing well i'll definitely have to google that thank you so much guys thank you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is john kohler over 25 years ago he escaped a near-death experience with spinal meningitis changed his diet and tomorrow he's going to show you the easiest way to eat more fruits and vegetables and i think the easiest way is to stop eating crap and eat veggies all right and clean your environment thanks again dr lyle and dr hawk you're our favorites take care bye have a good one
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